Bücher der Reihe Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century

Drawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens' illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in C19th visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.

This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children's Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children's culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.

Through innovative readings of seven novels, Creating character demonstrates how the Victorian sensation authors Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins employed, challenged and explored diverse, and sometimes contradictory, theories of character formation in their fiction -- .

Engine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn urban conveyance. The book introduces the omnibus as a key vector for understanding the intersection of urban and literary modernity in France. -- .

Every Siddal poem is close read alongside works by Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Tennyson and Keats and with reference to prevailing cultural, political and religious contexts to give the most comprehensive analysis yet of this enigmatic, previously undervalued poetic voice. -- .

Madrid on the move offers an account of illustrated print culture and the urban experience in nineteenth-century Spain. It provides a fresh account of modernity from a transnational perspective. Drawing on different kinds of printed images and texts, the book explores what being modern meant to people in their daily lives. -- .

This collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a groundbreaking challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by prioritising southern cultural networks in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. Worlding the south examines the dialectics of literary worldedness in ways that recognise inequalities of power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. The collection revises current literary histories of the ''British world'' by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, and south-south perspectives.

At the heart of the book is a departure from the obsession with "modernity" that has been so prominent in nineteenth-century cultural studies. -- .

Through the analysis of a wide range of sources, which include aquarium manuals, articles and fictional works, The Victorian aquarium investigates the nineteenth-century vogue for home tanks; the book retraces the development and decline of the 'aquarium mania', exploring both its historical specificity and its far-ranging cultural resonance. -- .

Tracing the dual alphabet from its intervention by Carolingian scribes to its rejection by modernist poets and the Bauhaus printers, Edwards shows how Charles Dickens and other nineteenth century writers used the distinction between upper and lower case letters in unconventional ways and in the interests of a wider radicalism. -- .

Pasts at play showcases a range of approaches to children's literature and culture, from disciplines including Classics, English Literature, and History. The ten essays integrate visual and material culture into historical practice to analyse how nineteenth-century children interacted playfully with the past to generate moral lessons. -- .

This book aims to intervene in current critical contexts for the study of nineteenth-century literature within the academy and beyond. Topics discussed include science and technology, poetry and philosophy, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, Punjabi popular culture and the neo-Victorian in literature, film and performance. -- .

Charlotte Bronte: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Bronte's life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Bronte's first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. -- .

Confronted by a complex new society, nineteenth-century Spaniards wrestled with how to envisage their lives. From trying to be universal through to acting as a cultural entrepreneur, this volume explores the possibilities and uncertainties that unfolded in their reconfigured world -- .

This volume explores the novels and short stories of the popular author Richard Marsh through a range of critical lenses. An exemplary figure of the New Grub Street, Marsh was an important presence within fin-de-siecle literary culture, whose middlebrow genre fiction simultaneously reinforces and challenges the dominant discourses of the period. -- .

Extends counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory -- .

This collection places the life and work of Margaret Harkness at the heart of a broader consideration of the socially turbulent decades around the turn of the twentieth century in order to illuminate historical forms of women's political activism. -- .

This book aims to intervene in current critical contexts for the study of nineteenth-century literature within the academy and beyond. Topics discussed include science and technology, poetry and philosophy, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, Punjabi popular culture and the neo-Victorian in literature, film and performance.

An invaluable compendium of sources relating to the Great Exhibition -- .

An invaluable compendium of sources relating to the Great Exhibition -- .

Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë¿s life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë¿s first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts.